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How teams with diverse experiences power innovation - Robyn Denholm, COO, Telstra - YouTube

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I'm delighted to invite to the stage Robyn Denholm,

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who joined Telstra over the summer

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as our Chief Operations Officer.

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So, Robyn, just like to talk a little bit about

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sort of some of those experiences

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or how bits of diversity have influenced your career.

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Well, thank you, and thanks for having me here today.

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I have a fundamental...

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And it's evolved over the years,

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but a fundamental belief that

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if you put different people with different experiences

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around the table,

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you actually can create something different, a different outcome.

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If you are faced with the same problem

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and you've got the same background and the same thinking,

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you'll normally try and solve the problem the same way.

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The founding of Sun was four founders.

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You had Vinod Khosla, who was an engineer,

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had studied at Stanford, had come over to Stanford from India

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to do his PhD...Masters and PhD,

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and actually then caught up with the other three,

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one of which was Andy Bechtolsheim.

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He was at Carnegie Mellon doing a PhD.

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And then Scott McNealy, who was not doing his PhD,

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who actually wasn't an engineer,

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was more of a sales and marketing and business person.

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And then they went and recruited Bill Joy,

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who was actually at Berkeley, who was a software guy.

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Never had done anything on the hardware side at all.

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And the four of them got together and actually created Sun

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on the Stanford campus.

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And essentially, the four together

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actually fulfilled different parts of the spectrum.

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Very different personalities,

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very different backgrounds, very different ways of thinking.

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You know, some of them introvert, some of them more extrovert,

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some of them you can't get a word in edgeways,

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depending on what's going on.

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But they all had a common purpose,

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which was actually to build a network,

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one of the first networks that actually was better

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than anything else that was out there.

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That's, to me, a great example

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of how completely different backgrounds,

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getting together to actually produce something phenomenal.

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You know, in some respects, the dotcom era wouldn't have happened

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without some of the inventions

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that they actually created over the years.

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And obviously it wasn't just the four of them.

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Then they recruited people.

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And one of the things that McNealy always said

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is to recruit better than you, you know.

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The first thing you have to do is build a management team,

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or a team of people that are actually smarter than you are

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so that you can actually continue that wave of innovative thinking

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and that type of thing.

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That's one of the earliest examples where I really sort of thought,

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"Wow, this is how that all happened."

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So that innovative thinking,

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the modern way we sort of talk about disruption,

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if you're in an industry and kind of used to doing things a certain way,

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you tend to think that way.

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So disruption tends to take that sort of shock from the outside.

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So it is thinking about a problem in a fundamentally different way.

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I mean, I think that's the definition of innovation,

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that you actually don't think about necessarily how it was done before,

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but you approach it from a quite different way of thinking.

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And from a customer perspective, again, you've got customers

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with vastly different needs, wants.

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Absolutely.

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I think that voice of the customer's very important

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in the innovation cycle.

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Not necessarily to say, OK,

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we're going to produce what the customer wants all the time,

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because sometimes in an innovative world, actually,

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the customer hasn't even thought of what it is that they really want.

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And so to understand the business of the customer,

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to actually see what their pain points are

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or the problems that they're trying to solve

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and then produce products and services that actually answer that

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as a problem statement, if you like.

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And again, all the engineering companies

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that I've been with over the years, including Telstra,

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actually do that, take the voice of the customer

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and put it into that innovation cycle.

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So, for example, at Juniper,

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the very reason why Juniper was around and thrived

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was they fundamentally changed the way routing was done

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in terms of networks.

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And why did they do that?

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Because the internet wasn't scaling.

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The actual internet was not scaling at that point.

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Various companies had talked to the universities

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in the valley

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to see what ideas people had

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to actually change the way routing was done.

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And what Pradeep and the team did at the time

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was they really separated the control plane

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from the forwarding plane,

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and actually that's...

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But that wasn't traditionally how routing was done.

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You had to have it all together.

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So to me, that's another example of where a different way of thinking -

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why can't we turn this on its head or separate it

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or, you know, move it in a different way,

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where you had software where the routing tables were stored,

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that type of thing,

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as opposed to having to carry it inside the same configuration.

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And thinking about software defined networking

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and network function virtualisation,

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we're going through exactly the same thing in a way, aren't we?

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Yeah, I mean, to me, it's applying some of the fundamental principles

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that have happened in the compute space

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to the networking problem,

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because at the end of the day, you know,

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network elements are computers.

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And so the fact that it hasn't happened before

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isn't because it can't,

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it's just because no-one's really thought about how to do it before.

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So I'm actually very excited about this new wave

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'cause I think, one, it's gonna dramatically reduce

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the cost per bit of traffic as we move forward...

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Sorry if I'm getting too technical.

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But for me that's really exciting.

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I mean, half the industries today would not be around

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without what's happened from a networking perspective.

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I mean, Facebook wouldn't exist because it would be very, very slow

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if you had to do a dial-up to actually log in

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to check your status of your friends every day, right?

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That would not have happened if those innovations hadn't happened.

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Or in this next wave

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where the sharing economy is really taking off,

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you can only do that with the technology

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to enable the connection of those individuals

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or that market place or that type of thing.

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So to me, um, there's a huge amount out there

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that can happen as a flow-on effect of some of the technologies

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that we're working on and the industry is working on.

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